As many of you know, I was a pragmatic supporter of Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary of 2016. By “pragmatic” supporter, that means that I believed in his message but was not troubled to vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election. I’ve been a democrat all my life. (I literally cried in 1980 when Reagan won). The interesting impact of that is that my Facebook friends list still, to this day, a year later, contains many Bernie supporters. Some of my Bernie friends are rather ardent, where Bernie could do no wrong. Many of that subset are absolutely convinced that Bernie was cheated out of the nomination and that the cheating gave the election to Trump. They literally blame the Democratic National Committee (DNC) for the Trump presidency. For this group, Hillary’s book “What Happened” is a very negative thing. They feel that Clinton ran a bad campaign, that she was the wrong candidate, etc. For her to describe her reasons for the loss feels, for them, to be a case of a blind fool describing why they failed. By the Duning-Kruger effect, a person who fails is very often not competent to describe why they failed. Clinton, in her book, describes 16 reasons that she failed. She gives some clear reasons that make sense. I won’t go into a lot of detail about what she DID include. Many are obvious. Things like gaffes (deplorables) and misogyny. None of the Bernie friends disputed any of these. They are real. But there are still three reasons that she did not include. Three Things Clinton Missed And here’s the...

Well, a few days ago, the Army Corp of Engineers blocked the last little bit of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Congratulations to the First Nations effort at Standing Rock to stop the construction of a pipeline on their land, and to draw attention to the risks to our water. We won. We won a secondary battle. But do we really know what war we are fighting? Are we prepared to win it? It was a good win. The tribes came together. The American people backed the tribes. These are two things that haven’t happened before in anything like the manner that they did with Standing Rock. We built a coalition that can accomplish great things. Believe it or not, the battle that was won was not a strategic win. It was a small win. It was an important win. But it was not a strategic win. The DAPL was designed to pump oil a long distance across country… oil that had already been pumped out of the ground. Once the oil is out of the ground, IT HAS TO MOVE. It cannot be left in tanks on top of the ground (that’s not better from an environmental standpoint). If we don’t put it in a pipeline to move it, how do we move it? Oil Train? Tanker Truck? Riverboat? All of these alternatives are WORSE than a pipeline! All are more likely to leak. All are more dirty to water and land and air. The solution is to step back and look at the whole problem. It is to ask WHY are we pumping oil out of the ground? If...

I copied this article from my Facebook feed. I wrote it shortly after a lone gunman took aim at the police in Dallas on July 7th who were protecting a peaceful BLM protest. The BLM folks were upset at two killings of black men over the course of two days, at the hands of the police. I copied it here to keep it. With all the cries of racism and fear mongering this week, I’m reminded of a lesson my father taught me. Now, for those of you who don’t know, my father was Dr. Anand Malik. He was a college professor who emigrated to the US from India. He had lived through the partition of India, which is a level of secular violence that no one in the USA has ever seen and few can comprehend. We used to sit around on Sunday mornings flipping through the newspapers. Plural. Newspapers. We got the Knoxville newspaper, of course, but he also subscribed to the New York Times Sunday Edition. He loved the NYT but we couldn’t afford the daily edition. But every Sunday, we’d go through and the house would quickly be scattered with sections from art to lifestyle to editorial to hard news. One Sunday, there was an article on the refugee camps in the Palestinian territories. He mumbled something and I asked him what was wrong. “A hundred thousand people stuck in those camps, it’s senseless. In India, during partition, there were MILLIONS of people displaced. No camps. Everyone had to simply find a place to go, and go there. Today, there are no camps.” I said...

As many of you know, I joined forces with Martin Sykes and Mark West to write a book called “Stories That Move Mountains.” The book provides a step-by-step approach to creating a one-page “visual story” that can be used to effectively convince an audience of the value of your proposal. Our method, called CAST, has proven very effective in sales, training, and organizational change. For more information, visit http://storiesthatmovemountains.com ...

This article was originally published on wordpress.com, but I moved it here and updated it in 2014. — Back in 2011, when I wrote this, my daughter was in middle school. One of her assignments was to select from a small list of amendments to the US Constitution and write a short paper about it. She asked me which one, and I told her to pick the 14th amendment. Lots of meat in that one. I asked her to do some research and know what came up? Explanations useful for college-level work, but nothing for a middle school student. Sure, there were sites that talk about the constitution in general, and about what an amendment is, but nothing that looks specifically at the 14th amendment, written in simple words for a non-law-student to understand. So, I’m posting this post here. I hope, through the magic of Bing and other search engines, parents and kids may find this in the future and it could be helpful. Kids: don’t steal my words for your homework. Use this site to understand, but your assignment should be in your own words. Parents: there are lots of sites that make things up about the Constitution and 14th Amendment. This post will stick to facts from actual court cases. If you feel I’ve missed something, feel free to comment. I take all comments seriously. The Constitution and Amendments, Kids version We all know what the constitution is, right? It is a document, hand written on paper, that writes down the “rules” that our Government follows. It defines the entire system. All the stuff about the government...